Siri suffering from extended outage

Apple’s new virtual personal assistant Siri is currently suffering from a major outage — the first extended outage since the service launched on October 14th. Requests made to Siri are met with a period of silence followed by ominous responses such as “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network,” or “Uh oh, something’s wrong. Can you try again?” Reports of the outage began hitting the Web early Thursday afternoon and as of 6:30 p.m. EDT, Siri had not yet recovered. Some claim that a reboot resolves the issue but most still appear to be unable to use the service. Unique to Apple’s iPhone 4S, Siri is an intelligent digital assistant that answers questions and performs tasks at the user’s request. Believed by some to be a driving force behind the success of the iPhone 4S, Siri allows users to speak conversationally and it performs functions not currently supported by voice control features on competing platforms.